Date

Breadcrumb

Launches and Closures

At the same time magazines are trimming resources and slashing staff, Condé Nast is massively expanding — far beyond the publishing industry.

Text:

In the past few weeks, the Vogue publisher announced video channels, investments in e-commerce and a clothing line. Yesterday, the Condé Nast College of Fashion & Design held its inaugural classes. Next year, GQ and Vogue bars will serve cocktails in Bangkok.

“A year or so ago we took the word ‘publications’ off the building and took it off of our business cards,” he added. “There was this final commitment to the fact that we are a company that makes quality content ... and we’re going to put that on whatever medium it makes sense.”

Data from Ireland-based startup NewsWhip shows that the most viral stories are not always those curated on page one. Founder Paul Quigley told The Editor’s Weblog that this realization will challenge the mission of some news organizations, as social distribution favors emotionally-charged and unusual stories over traditional news.

As social networks become omnipresent, newspaper front pages are losing their lustre. A Pew Foundationstudy showed that social networks are now the greatest distributors of news, with 33 percent of young adults accessing news via social networks and only 13 percent through print and web newspapers. With more people sharing stories on Facebook and Twitter, fewer and fewer discover news stories through newspapers’ homepages and front pages. Quigley said this trend will likely be permanent, so news organizations need to learn to adapt a “social edge” to stay relevant.

“If we’ve got a story to tell it’s that social distribution won’t go away,” said Quigley, who will present NewsWhip at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe conference in London, 15-17 April. “Maybe Facebook or Twitter might go away, but the web of people is going to be how information is going to spread.

Author

Date

Soon-to-be launched Dutch news site De Correspondent shocked its own founders after raising more than €1 million from advance subscribers in eight days — and 13 fundraising days still remain.

Text:

Creator Rob Wijnberg told The Editor's Weblog he originally thought De Correspondent had a 50 percent chance of meeting its goal of 15,000 members. But as of Thursday, more than 17,000 people have shelled out €60 for an annual subscription to the news site, set to launch in September. According to the site, 48 members have additionally donated €1,000 or more to fund the project.

“We were overwhelmed, especially by how fast it was and especially by how much enthusiasm people showed for the initiative,” Wijnberg said. “People really mailed us lots of letters and tweets and everything saying that ‘I’m so glad you started this.’ We didn’t expect that.”

While this sort of drive is unusual, it is not unprecedented. Several years ago Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano similarly preemptively fundraised, and collected €5 million from 30,000 advance subscribers in 3 months.

De Correspondent has been in the works since Wijnberg quit his job as editor of Dutch national newspaper NRC Next in September. He said he noticed how people are “hounded by news” — often “struck by the same news from all different directions.”

Author

Date

The Boston Phoenix, a free alt-weekly known for its sharp commentary on politics and culture, announced on Wednesday its closing after 47 years in print.

Text:

The closure follows several hardships for the publication. Last year the Phoenix Media Group pulled alt-rock station 101.7 WFNX off the air, moving the property online. Last August, the publishers announced that the paper itself would merge with sister publication Stuff Magazine to become a magazine. Re-branding its content in the hopes of attracting the valuable advertisers, The Phoenix didn't get the national advertisers it needed.

Publisher Stephen M. Mindich released a statement yesterday, citing the economic crisis of 2007 and media changes as the reasons for the closure. He says:

“These have been extremely difficult times for our Company and despite the valiant effort by many, many past and current staff to attempt to stabilize and, in fact, reverse our significant financial losses, we have been unable to do so and they are no longer sustainable.”

The news of the abrupt closure came as a shock to the staff, as they were at work on the next issue. Editor-in-chief Carly Carioli lamented the absence of a proper closure for the magazine, but praised the dedication of its readers.

Author

Date

After 80 years in print, the venerable US magazine Newsweek will adopt an entirely digital format from the beginning of 2013, publishing its final print edition on December 31. In an announcement this morning, posted on the website of partner site TheDaily Beast, Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown explained:

‘In our judgment, we have reached a tipping point at which we can most efficiently and effectively reach our readers in all-digital format. This was not the case just two years ago. It will increasingly be the case in years ahead.’

According to Newsweek’s most recent publishers statement filed with the Audit Bureau of Circulations, print circulation of the magazine has dropped 51 percent since 2007. Such a decline contrasts with the relative success of its online component, again highlighted in Brown’s statement:

‘The Daily Beast now attracts more than 15 million unique visitors a month, a 70 percent increase in the past year alone – a healthy portion of this traffic generated each week by Newsweek’s strong original journalism’.

The new digital publication will be called Newsweek Global and will be supported by a paid subscription model. The Daily Beast will remain a separate site.

Tags

Author

Date

The New York Times is planning to further extend its international reach and tap into the promising Brazilian advertising market by launching a Portuguese-language website in the second half of next year.

The revelation follows a similar move by the Financial Times, which opened a newspaper printing plant in São Paulo earlier this month, and is taking strides to expand its Latin American web presence with a tailored homepage and mobile app.

Tags

Author

Date

International news translation platform Worldcrunch plans to expand its aggregation efforts in a big way—by enlisting the help of its contributors in finding “crunch" worthy articles from around the world, Nieman Journalism Lab reported.

Founded last year by Jeff Israely and Irène Toporkoff in Paris, Worldcrunch translates 20-30 articles per week written by its international news partners, which include French daily newspaper Le Monde and German daily Die Welt, as we previously reported. The articles, chosen by Worldcrunch’s team of journalists and covering topics such as politics to entertainment, are meant to provide English readers with broader perspectives of international affairs, as well as highlighting the viewpoints of citizens from the countries in question.

Worldcrunch has been touted as an appealing option in the face of reductions in foreign news coverage, as we previously reported. And the trend seems to extend past English-speaking readership: French weekly magazine Courrier International and Italian weekly Internazionale provide similar services for French and Italian readers, respectively.

Author

Date

The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) plans to launch an investigative news YouTube channel in July 2012, according to a press release. Funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the channel will spotlight videos from prominent broadcasters such as NPR, ABC News and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, among other freelance contributors, the release said.

The CIR, a nonprofit organization that produces public interest investigative journalism, will teach reporters working for the channel how to best reach online audiences, the release said. CIR and the Investigative News Network (INN) will also coordinate to try to capture the interest of online users through social media, the release said.

Michael Maness, Knight Foundation Vice President for Media Innovation and Journalism, said in the release, “This collaboration is poised to bring investigative reporting authoritatively onto the social web. We hope it will engage audiences and expand public appetite for visual story telling.”

Editors Weblog

The World Editors Forum is the organization within the World Association of Newspapers devoted to newspaper editors worldwide. The Editors Weblog (www.editorsweblog.org), launched in January 2004, is a WEF initiative designed to facilitate the diffusion of information relevant to newspapers and their editors.